Chapter 14 #2
Something goes shadowed in his expression. “They’re innocent,” he says shortly, before swinging over the railing and disappearing over the rope ladder, leaving me to wonder when I became not innocent.
Yes, I am head of the company he despises, but it’s not as if I decided to inherit. Does he understand that I never had a choice in this? And why do I care if he understands or not?
I’ve been dreading looking over the side of the ship, down at the water, but there’s nothing else for it.
I give Silas a minute to climb down before I clamber over the railing.
Even with Silas weighing the ladder down below, it sways and thuds against the side of the ship, making it hard to let go of each rung. I look down and wish I hadn’t.
Silas jumps easily into the boat where Ezra, Josephine, Teuila, and Zimri are already waiting, all of them seeming very far away.
The water seems violently alive in a way it doesn’t when one is standing on the ship deck, looking out at the flat horizon.
The waves beat like drums against the side of the ship, sending up sprays of foam that dampen my clothes and mist my face when I finally climb down.
The boat looks small amid the waves, the sea the color of gunmetal beneath.
A whaleboat is bigger than a lifeboat, but not so very much bigger.
Josephine and Zimri hold the ladder steady for me at the bottom, but I still manage to trip stepping off. For a second, I’m off-balance, water rushing up toward me, and panic blooms.
Then Silas catches me around the waist and sets me down with my feet on a bench. “Careful.” His hands press into me, heating through the old cotton, then he lets go just as quickly, drawing back like I’m the one whose skin is too hot.
He’s turned away before I can draw breath and moves to take up his position at the boat stern, quick and steady as if we were on flat land.
But the waves that look small and peaceful from the Heralder’s deck are heaving against the whaleboat; it rocks beneath my feet.
I gather my wits enough to sit down on the bench next to Zimri, who smiles at me though his eyes are grim. “You ready?”
I shrug, which is going to have to be enough answer for now. My stomach is churning suddenly and I want to keep my mouth closed.
We set off rowing, leaving the anchored Heralder behind. The movement helps my queasiness a little. I can see August watching from the railing, a column of bright color against the dark ship and dingy sky in his blue coat.
But soon the rowing requires my full attention. I thought being on the Heralder was already too close to the water, but here I could reach out and touch it if my grip on the oar weren’t white-knuckle tight; drops of freezing salt water fly up with each stroke and fleck my cheeks, my eyes.
The others are clearly practiced at this; they fall into a rhythm right away, rowing in sync like they share one mind.
I try my best to match their movements, and the boat rotates so that we’re rowing backward, facing away from the dead whale, yet moving toward it.
It’s unnerving, rowing in a direction I can’t see.
Silas is the only one with eyes on the whale, acting as the boatsteerer as the rest of us face him.
He braces himself in the whaleboat’s stern, using the steering oar to make small adjustments to our course.
His gaze is pinned to the horizon, his jaw set.
The smell when we near the dead whale isn’t what I expected.
It’s copper and iron and petrichor and smoke, with an electrical tinge that burns my throat.
Not the nauseating sick-sweet smell of most dead things.
Even more strangely, the rhythm of the wind and the water seems to change the closer we get to the creature—the wind becoming stronger and colder, the waves more choppy, like the very weather is in mourning. The very world.
We pull alongside the carcass and stop rowing.
I pull my shirt up over my nose and turn to look alongside the others, then quickly avert my eyes.
The carcass hangs low in the water, only a stretch of a few yards of flesh showing above the surface, a torn dorsal fin.
Something—sharks, likely, though I don’t want to think about that—has taken bites out of the whale, and most of the skin and blubber and some of the muscle are gone, exposing grayish-pink flesh.
Birds circle overhead, maybe frightened off by our presence.
“How do you think it died?” Ezra asks Silas, sounding grave.
A line has appeared between Silas’s brows. He shakes his head, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “I’m going to go in and take a look.” He addresses us as a group, eyes still on the whale. “Get the rope ready. We’ll have to tow it back to the Heralder.”
He crouches to unlace his boots, then pulls his shirt over his head.
I blink, taken off guard, though I don’t know why.
It’s not uncommon to see male sailors and dockworkers going around shirtless.
Not Silas, though. Lean muscles flex beneath freckled shoulders as he kicks his boots off.
I’m about to look back at the whale just to have somewhere to put my eyes when something else snags my gaze.
A scar in the shape of a cross stretches over his breastbone, bigger than my hand and faded with age. Though he told me about it in the hold that first night of the expedition, it’s still shocking to see, brutal in its clear deliberation, its right angles and straight edges.
He wears something around his neck; now he pulls it off and tosses it over his shoulder in the direction of his crew without looking. “Someone hold this for me.”
I’m the one to catch it, my hand shooting up automatically. And suddenly in my palm is an oval pendant carved of bone, strung on a leather cord. Like the one now hidden under my own collar. The pendant that floated to me in the chamber beneath the Spout.
He’s cursed too? I glance around to see the reactions of the others, but none of them seem surprised or are even paying attention. They must already know—the captain of the Cursed Crew, cursed himself.
Yet why would the finfolk curse one of their own? Questions churn in my mind, but I don’t have time to put the words in the right order before he dives neatly over the side of our boat.
My heart clutches, but I remind myself that not everyone fears the ocean like I do.
Silas is finfolk, after all, a creature of the sea.
Maybe that’s why no one seems concerned when he doesn’t resurface right away, even as the seconds stretch on.
Zimri starts to pull rope from the line tub, looping it around his arm.
I don’t realize I’m counting in my head until I hit thirty. When I hit a minute—“Um.” My voice sounds high and strained. “Should we be worried?”
“Not yet,” Teuila says cheerfully. “He does this a lot.”
“I wish he’d hurry, though,” Josephine grumbles. “All my clothes are going to smell like dead whale.”
Just then, Silas’s head pops up on the far side of the whale carcass. He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, and I try not to notice the relief that fills me at his resurfacing. His hand waves from the water, and Zimri tosses him the end of the rope.
While Silas laps the carcass, tying it up so we can bring it back to the Heralder, I look down at his pendant.
Its shape is slightly different from mine, its color darker, but otherwise they look the same, like two stones on the same beach.
No red spots like the others have. He hasn’t completed any favors to the finfolk.
Or maybe he’s tried and they haven’t been enough.
When he comes back to the whaleboat and mercifully puts his shirt back on, I don’t give the pendant back just yet, acting like I’ve forgotten about where it’s coiled in my jacket pocket. I want a reason to speak with him alone when we’re back on the ship.
On the Heralder, the rest of the crew is gathered at the gunwale when we finally pull up, evaluating the whale carcass with critical eyes.
They conjecture about how many barrels of meat it will yield as we come back up, and no one thanks the Cursed Crew.
As they start fastening the whale to the side of the ship to salvage what they can, I duck out of the crowd and follow Silas.
I catch up with him at the door to his stateroom. Belowdecks is empty in a way it almost never is; everyone else is above deck attending to the whale. He turns and his eyes widen to see me.
“Sorry,” I say too brightly, taking the pendant from my pocket. “Forgot to give you this back.”
His shirt sticks to his chest with seawater or sweat; his curls cling to his neck.
He blinks in surprise, like he’d forgotten all about it too, and I consider the casual way he tossed it over his shoulder beforehand, hardly seeming to care about the chance it would sail past our hands into the sea.
Either he has immense trust in the reflexes of his crew, or he is strangely careless about his chances of lifting his curse. Whatever it is.
“So you’re cursed too,” I say to him as I drop the pendant into his outstretched hand. I mean to make the words light and curious, but they come out accusatory, stung. “What is it?”
All this time, from our strange first conversation in my room at Fairfax Manor, he’s known about my heartbreak.
He’s known about my curse, and all its attendant ugliness and terror and desperation.
He took me to the enchanted pool beneath the Spout, he told me tales about Drekja and the cure I could find there, without ever mentioning that he shared the experience.
He looks at me for a long moment, as if debating whether to tell me.“It’s about the war with the finfolk,” he says eventually, quietly. “After the Volyar sank, the finfolk didn’t just tell me the message. They showed me. I saw it.”